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Saturday, November 23, 2013

Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response

Jesse Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at
the City University of New York. His books include Gut Reactions, The Emotional
Construction of Morals, and Beyond Human Nature.

In this article, Jesse Prinz argues that the source of our moral inclinations
is merely cultural.

Philosophy Now, issue 82, January/February 2011

Suppose you have a moral disagreement with someone, for
example, a disagreement about whether it is okay to live in a society where the
amount of money you are born with is the primary determinant of how wealthy you
will end up. In pursuing this debate, you assume that you are correct about the
issue and that your conversation partner is mistaken. You conversation partner
assumes that you are making the blunder. In other words, you both assume that
only one of you can be correct. Relativists reject this assumption. They
believe that conflicting moral beliefs can both be true. The stanch socialist
and righteous royalist are equally right; they just occupy different moral
worldviews.

Relativism has been widely criticized. It is attacked as
being sophomoric, pernicious, and even incoherent. Moral philosophers,
theologians, and social scientists try to identify objective values so as to
forestall the relativist menace. I think these efforts have failed. Moral
relativism is a plausible doctrine, and it has important implications for how
we conduct our lives, organize our societies, and deal with others.

Cannibals and Child Brides

Morals vary dramatically across time and place. One group’s
good can be another group’s evil. Consider cannibalism, which has been practiced
by groups in every part of the world. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday found
evidence for cannibalism in 34% of cultures in one cross-historical sample. Or
consider blood sports, such as those practiced in Roman amphitheaters, in which
thousands of excited fans watched as human beings engaged in mortal combat.
Killing for pleasure has also been documented among headhunting cultures, in
which decapitation was sometimes pursued as a recreational activity. Many
societies have also practiced extreme forms of public torture and execution, as
was the case in Europe before the 18th century. And there are cultures that
engage in painful forms of body modification, such as scarification, genital
infibulation, or footbinding – a practice that lasted in China for 1,000 years
and involved the deliberate and excruciating crippling of young girls.
Variation in attitudes towards violence is paralleled by variation in attitudes
towards sex and marriage. When studying culturally independent societies,
anthropologists have found that over 80% permit polygamy. Arranged marriage is
also common, and some cultures marry off girls while they are still pubescent
or even younger. In parts of Ethiopia, half the girls are married before their
15th birthday.

Of course, there are also cross-cultural similarities in
morals. No group would last very long if it promoted gratuitous attacks on
neighbors or discouraged childrearing. But within these broad constraints,
almost anything is possible. Some groups prohibit attacks on the hut next door,
but encourage attacks on the village next door. Some groups encourage parents
to commit selective infanticide, to use corporal punishment on children, or
force them into physical labor or sexual slavery.

Such variation cries out for explanation. If morality were
objective, shouldn’t we see greater consensus? Objectivists reply in two
different ways:

Deny variation. Some objectivists say moral variation is
greatly exaggerated – people really agree about values but have different
factual beliefs or life circumstances that lead them to behave differently. For
example, slave owners may have believed that their slaves were intellectually
inferior, and Inuits who practiced infanticide may have been forced to do so
because of resource scarcity in the tundra. But it is spectacularly implausible
that all moral differences can be explained this way. For one thing, the
alleged differences in factual beliefs and life circumstances rarely justify
the behaviors in question. Would the inferiority of one group really justify
enslaving them? If so, why don’t we think it’s acceptable to enslave people
with low IQs? Would life in the tundra justify infanticide? If so, why don’t we
just kill off destitute children around the globe instead of giving donations
to Oxfam? Differences in circumstances do not show that people share values;
rather they help to explain why values end up being so different.

Deny that variation matters. Objectivists who concede that
moral variation exists argue that variation does not entail relativism; after
all, scientific theories differ too, and we don’t assume that every theory is
true. This analogy fails. Scientific theory variation can be explained by
inadequate observations or poor instruments; improvements in each lead towards
convergence. When scientific errors are identified, corrections are made. By
contrast, morals do not track differences in observation, and there also is no
evidence for rational convergence as a result of moral conflicts. Western
slavery didn’t end because of new scientific observations; rather it ended with
the industrial revolution, which ushered in a wage-based economy. Indeed,
slavery became more prevalent after the Enlightenment, when science improved.
Even with our modern understanding of racial equality, Benjamin Skinner has
shown that there are more people living in de facto slavery worldwide today
than during the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When societies
converge morally, it’s usually because one has dominated the other (as with the
missionary campaigns to end cannibalism). With morals, unlike science, there is
no well-recognized standard that can be used to test, confirm, or correct when
disagreements arise.

Objectivists might reply that progress has clearly been
made. Aren’t our values better than those of the ‘primitive’ societies that
practice slavery, cannibalism, and polygamy? Here we are in danger of smugly
supposing superiority. Each culture assumes it is in possession of the moral
truth. From an outside perspective, our progress might be seen as a regress.
Consider factory farming, environmental devastation, weapons of mass
destruction, capitalistic exploitation, coercive globalization, urban
ghettoization, and the practice of sending elderly relatives to nursing homes.
Our way of life might look grotesque to many who have come before and many who
will come after.

Emotions and Inculcation

Moral variation is best explained by assuming that morality,
unlike science, is not based on reason or observation. What, then, is morality
based on? To answer this, we need to consider how morals are learned.

Children begin to learn values when they are very young,
before they can reason effectively. Young children behave in ways that we would
never accept in adults: they scream, throw food, take off their clothes in
public, hit, scratch, bite, and generally make a ruckus. Moral education begins
from the start, as parents correct these antisocial behaviors, and they usually
do so by conditioning children’s emotions. Parents threaten physical punishment
(“Do you want a spanking?”), they withdraw love (“I’m not going to play with
you any more!”), ostracize (“Go to your room!”), deprive (“No dessert for
you!”), and induce vicarious distress (“Look at the pain you’ve caused!”). Each
of these methods causes the misbehaved child to experience a negative emotion
and associate it with the punished behavior. Children also learn by emotional
osmosis. They see their parents’ reactions to news broadcasts and storybooks.
They hear hours of judgmental gossip about inconsiderate neighbors, unethical
coworkers, disloyal friends, and the black sheep in the family. Consummate
imitators, children internalize the feelings expressed by their parents, and,
when they are a bit older, their peers.

Emotional conditioning and osmosis are not merely convenient
tools for acquiring values: they are essential. Parents sometimes try to reason
with their children, but moral reasoning only works by drawing attention to
values that the child has already internalized through emotional conditioning.
No amount of reasoning can engender a moral value, because all values are, at
bottom, emotional attitudes.

Recent research in psychology supports this conjecture. It
seems that we decide whether something is wrong by introspecting our feelings:
if an action makes us feel bad, we conclude that it is wrong. Consistent with
this, people’s moral judgments can be shifted by simply altering their
emotional states. For example, psychologist Simone Schnall and her colleagues
found that exposure to fart spray, filth, and disgusting movies can cause
people to make more severe moral judgments about unrelated phenomena.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and colleagues have shown that
people make moral judgments even when they cannot provide any justification for
them. For example, 80% of the American college students in Haidt’s study said
it’s wrong for two adult siblings to have consensual sex with each other even
if they use contraception and no one is harmed. And, in a study I ran, 100% of
people agreed it would be wrong to sexually fondle an infant even if the infant
was not physically harmed or traumatized. Our emotions confirm that such acts
are wrong even if our usual justification for that conclusion (harm to the
victim) is inapplicable.

If morals are emotionally based, then people who lack strong
emotions should be blind to the moral domain. This prediction is borne out by
psychopaths, who, it turns out, suffer from profound emotional deficits.
Psychologist James Blair has shown that psychopaths treat moral rules as mere
conventions. This suggests that emotions are necessary for making moral
judgments. The judgment that something is morally wrong is an emotional
response.

It doesn’t follow that every emotional response is a moral
judgment. Morality involves specific emotions. Research suggests that the main
moral emotions are anger and disgust when an action is performed by another
person, and guilt and shame when an action is performed by one’s self.
Arguably, one doesn’t harbor a moral attitude towards something unless one is
disposed to have both these self- and other-directed emotions. You may be
disgusted by eating cow tongue, but unless you are a moral vegetarian, you
wouldn’t be ashamed of eating it.

In some cases, the moral emotions that get conditioned in
childhood can be re-conditioned later in life. Someone who feels ashamed of a
homosexual desire may subsequently feel ashamed about feeling ashamed. This
person can be said to have an inculcated tendency to view homosexuality as
immoral, but also a conviction that homosexuality is permissible, and the
latter serves to curb the former over time.

This is not to say that reasoning is irrelevant to morality.
One can convince a person that homophobia is wrong by using the light of reason
to draw analogies with other forms of discrimination, but this strategy can
only work if the person has a negative sentiment towards bigotry. Likewise,
through extensive reasoning, one might persuade someone that eating meat is
wrong; but the only arguments that will work are ones that appeal to prior
sentiments. It would be hopeless to argue vegetarianism with someone who does
not shudder at the thought of killing an innocent, sentient being. As David
Hume said, reason is always slave to the passions.

If this picture is right, we have a set of emotionally
conditioned basic values, and a capacity for reasoning, which allows us to
extend these values to new cases. There are two important implications. One is
that some moral debates have no resolution because the two sides have different
basic values. This is often the case with liberals and conservatives. Research
suggests that conservatives value some things that are less important to
liberals, including hierarchical authority structures, self-reliance, in-group
solidarity, and sexual purity. Debates about welfare, foreign policy, and
sexual values get stymied because of these fundamental differences.

The second implication is that we cannot change basic values
by reason alone. Various events in adulthood might be capable of reshaping our
inculcated sentiments, including trauma, brainwashing, and immersion in a new
community (we have an unconscious tendency towards social conformity). Reason
can however be used to convince people that their basic values are in need of
revision, because reason can reveal when values are inconsistent and
self-destructive. An essay on moral relativism might even convince someone to
give up some basic values, on the ground that they are socially inculcated. But
reason alone cannot instill new values or settle which values we should have.
Reason tells us what is the case, not what ought to be.

In summary, moral judgments are based on emotions, and
reasoning normally contributes only by helping us extrapolate from our basic
values to novel cases. Reasoning can also lead us to discover that our basic
values are culturally inculcated, and that might impel us to search for
alternative values, but reason alone cannot tell us which values to adopt, nor
can it instill new values.

God, Evolution, and Reason: Is There an Objective Moral
Code?

The hypothesis that moral judgments are emotionally based
can explain why they vary across cultures and resist transformation through
reasoning, but this is not enough to prove that moral relativism is true. An
argument for relativism must also show that there is no basis for morality
beyond the emotions with which we have been conditioned. The relativists must
provide reasons for thinking objectivist theories of morality fail.

Objectivism holds that there is one true morality binding
upon all of us. To defend such a view, the objectivist must offer a theory of
where morality comes from, such that it can be universal in this way. There are
three main options: Morality could come from a benevolent god; it could come
from human nature (for example, we could have evolved an innate set of moral
values); or it could come from rational principles that all rational people
must recognize, like the rules of logic and arithmetic. Much ink has been
spilled defending each of these possibilities, and it would be impossible here
to offer a critical review of all ethical theories. Instead, let’s consider
some simple reasons for pessimism.

The problem with divine commands as a cure for relativism is
that there is no consensus among believers about what God or the gods want us
to do. Even when there are holy scriptures containing lists of divine commands,
there are disagreements about interpretation: Does “Thou shalt not kill?” cover
enemies? Does it cover animals? Does it make one culpable for manslaughter and
self-defense? Does it prohibit suicide? The philosophical challenge of proving
that a god exists is already hard; figuring out who that god is and what values
are divinely sanctioned is vastly harder.

The problem with human nature as a basis for universal
morality is that it lacks normative import, that is, this doesn’t itself
provide us with any definitive view of good and bad. Suppose we have some
innate moral values. Why should we abide by them? Non-human primates often
kill, steal, and rape without getting punished by members of their troops.
Perhaps our innate values promote those kinds of behaviors as well. Does it
follow that we shouldn’t punish them? Certainly not. If we have innate values –
which is open to debate – they evolved to help us cope with life as
hunter-gatherers in small competitive bands. To live in large stable societies,
we are better off following the ‘civilized’ values we’ve invented.

Finally, the problem with reason, as we have seen, is that
it never adds up to value. If I tell you that a wine has a balance between
tannin and acid, it doesn’t follow that you will find it delicious. Likewise,
reason cannot tell us which facts are morally good. Reason is evaluatively
neutral. At best, reason can tell us which of our values are inconsistent, and
which actions will lead to fulfillment of our goals. But, given an inconsistency,
reason cannot tell us which of our conflicting values to drop, and reason
cannot tell us which goals to follow. If my goals come into conflict with your
goals, reason tells me that I must either thwart your goals, or give up caring
about mine; but reason cannot tell me to favor one choice over the other.

Many attempts have been made to rebut such concerns, but
each attempt has just fueled more debate. At this stage, no defense of
objectivism has swayed doubters, and given the fundamental limits mentioned
here (the inscrutability of divine commands, the normative emptiness of
evolution, and the moral neutrality of reason), objectivism looks unlikely.

Living With Moral Relativism

People often resist relativism because they think it has
unacceptable implications. Let’s conclude by considering some allegations and
responses.

Allegation: Relativism entails that anything goes.

Response: Relativists concede that if you were to inculcate
any given set of values, those values would be true for those who possessed
them. But we have little incentive to inculcate values arbitrarily. If we
trained our children to be ruthless killers, they might kill us or get killed.
Values that are completely self-destructive can’t last.

Allegation: Relativism entails that we have no way to
criticize Hitler.

Response: First of all, Hitler’s actions were partially
based on false beliefs, rather than values (‘scientific’ racism, moral
absolutism, the likelihood of world domination). Second, the problem with
Hitler was not that his values were false, but that they were pernicious. Relativism
does not entail that we should tolerate murderous tyranny. When someone
threatens us or our way of life, we are strongly motivated to protect
ourselves.

Allegation: Relativism entails that moral debates are
senseless, since everyone is right.

Response: This is a major misconception. Many people have
overlapping moral values, and one can settle debates by appeal to moral common
ground. We can also have substantive debates about how to apply and extend our
basic values. Some debates are senseless, however. Committed liberals and
conservatives rarely persuade each other, but public debates over policy can
rally the base and sway the undecided.

Allegation: Relativism doesn't allow moral progress.

Response: In one sense this is correct; moral values do not
become more true. But they can become better by other criteria. For example,
some sets of values are more consistent and more conducive to social stability.
If moral relativism is true, morality can be regarded as a tool, and we can
think about what we’d like that tool to do for us and revise morality
accordingly.

One might summarize these points by saying that relativism
does not undermine the capacity to criticize others or to improve one’s own
values. Relativism does tell us, however, that we are mistaken when we think we
are in possession of the one true morality. We can try to pursue moral values
that lead to more fulfilling lives, but we must bear in mind that fulfillment
is itself relative, so no single set of values can be designated universally
fulfilling. The discovery that relativism is true can help each of us
individually by revealing that our values are mutable and parochial. We should
not assume that others share our views, and we should recognize that our views
would differ had we lived in different circumstances. These discoveries may
make us more tolerant and more flexible. Relativism does not entail tolerance
or any other moral value, but, once we see that there is no single true
morality, we lose one incentive for trying to impose our values on others.

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To respond “at the right times with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence.”Aristotle (EN, 1106b21-3)